LUSTRE · atelier of impossible objects
A material that only exists on a screen.
LUSTRE is an atelier for a single impossible metal: liquid chrome that behaves like light. What you see below is not a photograph or a film. It is one object, computed every frame in your browser.
The premise
We design objects that cannot be manufactured, only computed.
No mould could hold it. No alloy could reflect like it. It exists only where light and mathematics meet: on the surface you are reading this from.
The material
Chrome that behaves like light.
The object cycles through three states as you descend: mirror chrome, an iridescent oil film, and frosted transmissive glass. Each is the same geometry, lit differently.
- 0
- vertices re-solved / frame
- 0ms
- millisecond frame budget
- 0%
- surface reflectivity
- 0g
- grams of matter
- Chrome
- Iridescent
- Glass
The collection
Three studies in an impossible metal.
Rendered stills from the atelier, each a different resting state of the same computed surface.
A torus that folds once, into itself.
A sphere held at the moment before it spills.
A column, melting at the crown.
The atelier
How a non-object gets made.
- 01
Compute
A high-resolution mesh is displaced by flowing noise, its surface re-solved sixty times a second.
- 02
Cure
A physically based material is tuned until light behaves the way an impossible metal would.
- 03
View
Nothing is filmed or stored. Every reflection you see is rendered, live, on your own machine.
The viewing room
Come and stand in front of something that cannot exist.
LUSTRE is a fictional atelier, built as a showcase of real-time 3D on the open web.